Robert Kennedy Jr. said, “A lot of life is about trying to turn bad experiences into something good… Even our worst misfortunes are gifts.” At the age 15, the sum total of my misfortunes consisted of doing badly on a test, failing to reach the 5 foot mark in high jump, or not hitting a note in my choir solo. My life was busy moving from the classroom to the athletic court I lived my life blindly unaware of others’ situations around me. I was selfish in an unexpected way. Little did I know of the storm and misfortunes that awaited just on the horizon.

My storm arrived at the age of 15 when I heard the three words: you have cancer. The persistent, nagging knee pain that we thought was a sports injury turned into a diagnosis of osteosarcoma, a very rare bone cancer. My greatest opponent turned out not to be one that I faced across the net, but one that arose within my own body. I exchanged my track spikes, volleyball shoes, and choir dress for nine months of intense, high dose chemotherapy. In addition to the challenges of chemo stays and homebound schooling, I had an invasive limb salvage surgery to remove the tumor and replaced my knee and the majority of my tibia with metal. Through advancements in engineering, I was able to keep my leg, yet not my dreams of a collegiate future in track or volleyball – a struggle to overcome almost as much as relearning to walk. For months after my first treatment ended, I spent my days angry and focused only on what cancer had stolen from me-what I wouldn’t recover – my ability to run and jump.

Yet, it is these very storms we endure that often shine a light upon what is important in life, giving us a purpose and direction. It was in the struggle to find my new identity after treatment, combined with my time spent on the oncology floor, that fueled a passion and desire to help make a difference for other kids with cancer. At Curefest in Washington DC, I learned the power of using my voice to help create change. I was able to share my story and experiences with congressional staffers on Capitol Hill in hopes to gain their support for two childhood cancer bills. For the first time, I had felt like I had turned the tables on cancer, and I transformed my loss into something good. Instead of just focusing on everything cancer bad taken from me, I began to finally look at what I could change because of what had happened to me.

It is sometimes the broken road that leads us to our future, and for myself, it led to the College of Engineering at Purdue University. When I relapsed in October 2023, I met a teenager, an athlete, who shared my diagnosis, and who would also share my same surgery, my same loss, and my same anger. Suddenly, I wanted to make it better for him and others facing limb salvage surgery. It is my hope to enter into the field of biomedical engineering with the goal of improving the design of current prosthetics. So perhaps one day, a young athlete with bone cancer will once again lace up their athletic shoes and head back onto the field, court, or track with an endoprosthesis that allows them to do so much more than just keep their ten toes on the ground.

I can only imagine what life may have looked like for myself if the doctor would not have uttered those three words. Yet, we can only walk the paths available to us, learning to find joy in each day despite the circumstances and viewing life not in not what cancer has taken but what has been given to us because of our set-backs, struggles, and triumphs. The people I have met along this path have shown me what kindness, love, and generosity for others can accomplish, and as a teenager with cancer, my thoughts are now focused less upon myself and more on how I can make a difference in the lives of others. As bone cancer survivor Ted Kennedy Jr said, “You see, my father taught me that even our most profound losses are survivable, and it is what we do with that loss, our ability to transform it into a positive event, that is one of my father’s greatest lessons.” And I have to agree, it is indeed.